Yle: In the West, they cannot figure out Putin’s goal in the “bargaining” around Ukraine and NATO

The Russian Federation has entered the game with the Western world and has chosen its favorite tactic for this – to demand the impossible. According to YLE, a high-ranking veteran of the Finnish armed forces, Pekka Toveri, is convinced of this.

“When you demand three times what you actually get and get a third, you end up getting what you want,” he revealed the Kremlin’s alleged intent.

However, what is at stake in the game is still unknown to the retired general, as well as to the “collective West” in general, although the immediate threat concerns Ukraine. “No one knows what the original intentions are, what Russia is striving for, and what it will be satisfied with,” the former military leader said.

Jukka Savolainen, head of the analytical department of the European Center for Combating Hybrid Threats, agrees that Moscow will not come out of the Ukrainian crisis empty-handed. The experts recalled that the Russian authorities have repeatedly said that they need “security guarantees throughout the Eurasian space, which became the subject of discussion (with the United States and NATO – “Rosbalt”)”, however, “quite little” is known “about the achievements of Russia, for example, in the Belarusian direction”.

At the same time, the West, as Savolainen believes, almost could not resist the game proposed by the Kremlin: “They only asked what was bothering you and if we could do anything to help.”

In turn, Finnish Defense Minister Antti Kaikkonen said he did not notice the easing of tension near the borders of Ukraine. “My anxiety about the situation has intensified. It is explosive,” he said after Friday’s NATO summit, which gathered over a possible war between Russia and Ukraine.

According to Kaikkonen, the heads of the defense ministries of the countries of the alliance expressed their solidarity – “the current situation in Europe has become the most tense since the Cold War.”

At the same time, the head of the Finnish Ministry of Defense was encouraged by the fact that President Vladimir Putin wished to “continue dialogue with the West and Ukraine.”

Earlier, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said during a meeting of the UN Security Council dedicated to the Ukrainian crisis that the Russian military would allegedly be ready to launch an offensive in the “next days”, and for it to take place, the Russian side would “create a pretext”. Read more here.

Meanwhile, the day before it became known that the heads of the unrecognized republics of Donbass announced the start of a mass evacuation of the population to Russia because of the “threat of Ukraine’s invasion.” After that, Putin ordered to allocate 10 thousand rubles to each refugee from the LDNR.